The Question of Certainty

Chapter II
Philosophy's Search for the Immutable

IN THE PREVIOUS chapter, we noted incidentally the distinction
made in the classic tradition between knowledge and belief, or,
as Locke put it, between knowledge and judgment. According to
this distinction the certain and knowledge are co-extensive.
Disputes exist, but they are whether sensation or reason affords
the basis of certainty; or whether existence or essence is its
object. In contrast with this identification, the very word "belief"
is eloquent on the topic of certainty. We believe in the
absence of knowledge or complete assurance. Hence the quest for
certainty has always been an effort to transcend belief. Now
since, as we have already noted, all matters of practical action
involve an element of uncertainty, we can ascend from belief to
knowledge only by isolating the latter from practical doing and
making.

In this chapter we are especially concerned with the effect of
the ideal of certainty as something superior to belief upon the
conception of the nature and function of philosophy. Greek thinkers
saw dearly-and logically-that experience cannot furnish us, as
respects cognition of existence, with anything more than contingent
probability. Experience cannot deliver to us necessary truths;
truths completely demonstrated by reason. Its conclusions are
particular, not universal. Not being "exact" they come
short of "science." Thus there arose the distinction
between rational truths or, in modern terminology, truths relating
to the relation of ideas, and "truths" about matters
of existence, empirically ascertained. Thus not merely the arts
of practice, industrial and social, were stamped matters of belief
rather than of knowledge, but also all those sciences which are
matters of inductive inference from observation.

One might indulge in the reflection that they are none the worse
for all that, especially since the natural sciences have developed
a technique for achieving a high degree of probability and for
measuring, within assignable limits, the amount of probability
which attaches in particular cases to conclusions. But historically
the matter is not so simple as to permit of this retort. For
empirical or observational sciences were placed in invidious contrast
to rational sciences which dealt with eternal and universal objects
and which therefore were possessed of necessary truth. Consequently
all observational sciences as far as their material could not
be subsumed under forms and principles supplied by rational science
shared in the depreciatory view held about practical affairs.
They are relatively low, secular and profane compared with the
perfect realities of rational science.

And here is a justification for going back to something as remote
in time as Greek philosophy. The whole classic tradition down
to our day has continued to hold a slighting view of experience
as such, and to hold up as the proper goal and ideal of true knowledge
realities which even if they are located in empirical things cannot
be known by experimental methods. The logical consequence for
philosophy itself is evident. Upon the side of method, it has
been compelled to claim for itself the possession of a method
issuing from reason itself, and having the warrant of reason,
independently of experience. As long as the view obtained that
nature itself is truly known by the same rational method, the
consequences at least those which were evident-were not serious.
There was no break between philosophy and genuine science-or
what was conceived to be such. In fact, there was not even a
distinction there were simply various branches of philosophy,
metaphysical, logical, natural, moral, etc., in a descending scale
of demonstrative certainty. Since, according to the theory, the
subject-matter of the lower sciences was inherently of a different
character from that of true knowledge, there was no ground for
rational dissatisfaction with the lower degree of knowledge called
belief. Inferior knowledge or belief corresponded to the inferior
state of subject-matter.

The scientific revolution of the seventeenth century effected
a great modification. Science itself through the aid of mathematics
carried the scheme of demonstrative knowledge over to natural
objects. The "laws" of the natural world had that fixed
character which in the older scheme had belonged only to rational
and ideal forms. A mathematical science of nature couched in
mechanistic terms claimed to be the only sound natural philosophy.
Hence the older philosophies lost alliance with natural knowledge
and the support that had been given to philosophy by them. Philosophy
in maintaining its claim to be a superior form of knowledge was
compelled to take an invidious and so to say malicious attitude
toward the conclusions of natural science. The framework of the
old tradition had in the meantime become embedded in Christian
theology, and through religious teaching was made a part of the
inherited culture of those innocent of any technical philosophy.
Consequently, the rivalry between philosophy and the new science,
with respect to the claim to know reality, was converted in effect
into a rivalry between the spiritual values guaranteed by the
older philosophic tradition and the conclusions of natural knowledge.
The more science advanced the more it seemed to encroach upon
the special province of the territory over which philosophy had
claimed jurisdiction. Thus philosophy in its classic form became
a species of apologetic justification for belief in an ultimate
reality in which the values which should regulate life and control
conduct are securely enstated.

There are undoubted disadvantages in the historic manner of approach
to the problem which has been followed. It may readily be thought
either that the Greek formulation which has been emphasised has
no especial pertinency with respect to modern thought and especially
to contemporary philosophy; or that no philosophical statement
is of any great importance for the mass of non-philosophic persons.
Those interested in philosophy may object that the criticisms
passed are directed if not at a man of straw at least to positions
that have long since lost their actuality. Those not friendly
to any form of philosophy may inquire what import they have for
any except professed philosophers.

The first type of objection will be dealt with somewhat in
extenso in the succeeding chapter, in which I shall try to
show how modern philosophies, in spite of their great diversity,
have been concerned with problems of adjustment of the conclusions
of modern science to the chief religious and moral tradition of
the western world; together with the way in which these problems
are connected with retention of the conception of the relation
of knowledge to reality formulated in Greek thought. At the point
in the discussion now reached, it suffices to point out that,
in spite of great changes in detail, the notion of a separation
between knowledge and action, theory and practice, has been perpetuated,
and that the beliefs connected with action are taken to be uncertain
and inferior to value compared with those inherently connected
with objects of knowledge, so that the former are securely established
only as they derived from the latter. Not the specific content
of Greek thought is pertinent to present problems, but its insistence
that security is measured by certainty of knowledge, while the
latter is measured by adhesion to fixed and immutable objects,
which therefore are independent of what men do in practical activity.

The other objection is of a different sort. It comes from those
who feel that not merely Greek philosophy but philosophy in any
form is remote from all significant human concern. It is willing
to admit or rather assert that it is presumptuous for philosophy
to lay claim to knowledge of a higher order than that given by
natural science, but it also holds that this is no great matter
in any case except for professional philosophers.

There would be force in this latter objection were it not. that
those who make it hold for the most part the same philosophy of
certainty and its proper object that is held by philosophers,
save in an inchoate form. They are not interested in the notion
that philosophic thought is a special means of attaining this
object and the certainty it affords, but they are far from holding,
either explicitly or implicitly, that the arts of intelligently
directed action are the means by which security of values are
to be attained. With respect to certain ends and goods they accept
this idea. But in thinking of these ends and values as material,
as related to health, wealth, control of conditions for the sake
of an inferior order of consequences, they retain the same division
between a higher reality and a lower that is formulated in classic
philosophy. They may be innocent of the vocabulary that speaks
of reason, necessary truth, the universal, things in themselves
and appearances. But they incline to believe that there is some
other road than that of action, directed by knowledge, to achieve
ultimate security of higher ideals and purposes. They think of
practical action as necessary for practical utilities, but they
mark off practical utilities from spiritual and ideal values.
Philosophy did not originate the underlying division. It only
gave intellectual formulation and justification to ideas that
were operative in men's minds generally. And the elements of
these ideas are as active in present culture as they ever were in the past. Indeed,
through the diffusion of religious doctrines, the idea that ultimate
values are a matter of special revelation and are to be embodied
in life by special means radically different from the arts of
action that deal with lower and lesser ends has been accentuated
in the popular mind.

Here is the point which is of general human import instead of
concern merely to professional philosophers. What about the security
of values, of the things which are admirable, honourable, to be
approved of and striven for? It is probably in consequence of
the derogatory view held of practice that the ion of the secure
place of values in human experience is seldom raised in connection
with the problem of the relation of knowledge and practice. But
upon any view concerning the status of action, the scope of the
latter cannot be restricted to self-seeking acts, nor to those
of a prudential aspect, nor in general to things of expediency
and what are often termed "utilitarian" affairs. The
maintenance and diffusion of intellectual values, of moral excellencies,
the aesthetically admirable, as well as the maintenance of order
and decorum in human relations are dependent upon what men do.

Whether because of the emphasis of traditional religion salvation
of the personal soul or for some other reason, there is a tendency
to restrict the ultimate scope of morals to the reflex effect
of conduct on one's self. Even utilitarianism, with all its seeming
independence of traditional theology and its emphasis upon the
general good as the criterion for judging conduct, insisted in
its hedonistic psychology upon private Pleasure as the motive
for action. The idea that the stable and expanding institution
of all things that make life worth while throughout all human
relationships is the real object of all intelligent conduct
is depressed from view by the current conception of morals as
a special kind of action chiefly concerned with either the virtues
or the enjoyments of individuals in their personal capacities.
In changed form, we still retain the notion of a division of
activity into two kinds having very different worths. The result
is the depreciated meaning that has come to be attached to the
very meaning of the "practical" and the useful. Instead
of being extended to cover all forms of action by means of which
all the values of life are extended and rendered more secure,
including the diffusion of the fine arts and the cultivation of
taste, the processes of education and all activities which are
concerned with rendering human relationships more significant
and worthy, the meaning of "practical" is limited to
matters of ease, comfort, riches, bodily security and police order,
possibly health, etc., things which in their isolation from other
goods can only lay claim to restricted and narrow value. In consequence,
these subjects are handed over to technical sciences and arts;
they are no concern of "higher" interests which feel
that no matter what happens to inferior goods in the vicissitudes
of natural existence, the highest values are immutable characters
of the ultimately real.

Our depreciatory attitude toward "practice" would be
modified if we habitually thought of it in its most liberal sense,
and if we surrendered our customary dualism between two separate
kinds of value, one intrinsically higher and one inherently lower.
We should regard practice as the only means (other than accident)
by which whatever is judged to be honourable, admirable, approvable
can be kept in concrete experienceable existence. In this connection
the entire import of "morals" would be transformed.
How much of the tendency to ignore permanent objective consequences
in differences made in natural and social relations; and how much
of the emphasis upon personal and internal motives and dispositions
irrespective of what they objectively produce and sustain, are
products of the habitual depreciation of the worth of action in
comparison with forms of mental processes, of thought and sentiment,
which make no objective difference in things themselves?

It would be possible to argue (and, I think, with much justice)
that failure to make action central in the search for such security
as is humanly possible as a survival of the impotency of men in
those stages of civilisation when he had few means of regulating
and utilising the conditions upon which the occurrence of consequences
depend. As long as man was unable by means of the arts of practice
to direct the course of events, it was natural for him to seek
an emotional substitute; in the absence of actual certainty in
the midst of a precarious and hazardous world, men cultivated
all sorts of things that would give them the feeling of
certainty. And it is possible that, when not carried to an illusory
point, the cultivation of the feeling gave man courage and confidence
and enabled him to carry the burdens of life more successfully.
But one could hardly seriously contend that this fact, if it
be such, is one upon which to found a reasoned philosophy.

It is to the conception of philosophy that we come back. No mode
of action can, as we have insisted, give anything approaching
absolute certitude it provides insurance but no assurance. Doing
is always subject to peril, to the danger of frustration. When
men began to reflect philosophically it seemed to them altogether
too risky to leave the place of values at the mercy of acts the
results of which are never sure. This precariousness might hold
as far as empirical existence, existence in the sensible and phenomenal
world, is concerned; but this very uncertainty seemed to render
it the more needful that ideal goods should be shown to have,
by means of knowledge of the most assured type, an indefeasible
and inexpugnable position in the realm of the ultimately real.
So at least we may imagine men to have reasoned. And to-day
many persons find a peculiar consolation in the face of the unstable
and dubious presence of values in actual experience by projecting
a perfect form of good into a realm of essence, if not into a
heaven beyond the earthly skies, wherein their authority, if not
their existence, is wholly unshakeable.

Instead of asking how far this process is of that compensatory
kind with which recent psychology has made us familiar, we are
inquiring into the effect upon philosophy. It will not be denied,
I suppose, that the chief aim of those philosophies which I have
called classical, has been to show that the realities which are
the objects of the highest and most necessary knowledge are also
endowed with the values which correspond to our best aspirations,
admirations and approvals. That, one may say, is the very heart
of all traditional philosophic idealisms. There is a pathos,
having its own nobility, in philosophies which think it their
proper office to give an intellectual or cognitive I certification
to the ontological reality of the highest values. It is difficult
for men to see desire and choice set earnestly upon the good and
yet being frustrated, without their imagining a realm in which
the good has come completely to its own, and is identified with
a Reality in which resides all ultimate power. The failure and
frustration of actual life is then attributed to the fact that
this world is finite and phenomenal, sensible rather than real,
or to the weakness of our finite apprehension, which cannot see
that the discrepancy between existence and value is merely seeming,
and that a fuller vision would behold partial evil an element
in complete good. Thus the office of philosophy is to project
by dialectic, resting supposedly upon self-evident premises, a
realm in which the object of completest cognitive certitude is
also one with the object of the heart's best aspiration. The
fusion of the good and the true with unity and plenitude of Being
thus becomes the goal of classic philosophy.

The situation would strike us as a curious one were it not so
familiar. Practical activity is dismissed to a world of low grade
reality. Desire is found only where something is lacking and
hence its existence is a sign of imperfection of Being. Hence
one must go to passionless reason to find perfect reality and
complete certitude. But nevertheless the chief philosophic interest
is to prove that the essential properties of the reality that
is the object of pure knowledge are precisely those characteristics
which have meaning in connection with affection, desire and choice.
After degrading practical affairs in order to exalt knowledge,
the chief task of knowledge turns out to be to demonstrate the
absolutely assured and permanent reality of the values with which
practical activity is concerned! Can we fall to see the irony
in a situation wherein desire and emotion are relegated to a position
inferior in every way to that of knowledge, while at the same
time the chief problem of that which is termed the highest and
most perfect knowledge is taken to be the existence of evil-that
is, of desires errant and frustrated?

The contradiction involved, however, is much more than a purely
intellectual one-which if purely theoretical would be innocuously
lacking in practical consequences. The thing which concerns all
of us as human beings is precisely the greatest attainable security
of values in concrete existence. The thought that the values
which are unstable and wavering in the world in which we live
are eternally secure in a higher realm (which reason demonstrates
but which we cannot experience), that all the goods which are
defeated here are triumphant there, may give consolation to the
depressed. But it does not change the existential situation in
the least. The separation that has been instituted between theory
and practice, with its consequent substitution of cognitive quest
for absolute assurance for practical endeavour to make the existence
of good more secure in experience, has had the effect of distracting
attention and diverting energy from a task whose performance would
yield definite results.

The chief consideration in achieving concrete security of values
lies in the perfecting of methods of action. More activity,
blind striving, gets nothing forward. Regulation of conditions
upon which results depend is possible only by doing, yet only
by doing which has intelligent direction, which take cognisance
of conditions, observes relations of sequence, and which plans
and executes in the light of this knowledge. The notion that
thought, apart from action, can warrant complete certitude as
to the status of supreme good, makes no contribution to the central
problem of development of intelligent methods of regulation.
It rather depresses and deadens effort in that direction. That
is the chief indictment to be brought against the classic philosophic
tradition. Its import raises the question of the relation which
action sustains to knowledge in fact, and whether the quest for
certainty by other means than those of intelligent action does
not mark a baneful diversion of thought from its proper office.
It raises the question whether mankind has not now achieved a
sufficient degree of control of methods of knowing and of the
arts of practical action so that a radical change in our conceptions
of knowledge and practice is rendered both possible and necessary.

That knowing, as judged from the actual procedures of scientific
inquiry, has completely abandoned in fact the traditional separation
of knowing and doing, that the experimental procedure is one that
installs doing as the heart of knowing, is a theme that will occupy
our attention in later chapters. What would happen to philosophy
if it whole-heartedly made a similar surrender? What would be
its office if it ceased to deal with the problem of reality and
knowledge at large? In effect, its function would be to facilitate
the fruitful interaction of our cognitive beliefs, our beliefs
resting upon the most dependable methods of inquiry, with our
practical beliefs about the values, the ends and purposes, that
should control human action in the things of large and liberal
human import.

Such a view renounces the traditional notion that action is inherently
inferior to knowledge and preference for the fixed over the changing;
it involves the conviction that security attained by active control
is to be more prized than certainty in theory. But it does not
imply that action is higher and better than knowledge, and practice
inherently superior to thought. Constant and effective interaction
of knowledge and practice is something quite different from an
exaltation of activity for its own sake. Action, when directed
by knowledge, is method and means, not an end. The aim and end
is the securer, freer and more widely shared embodiment of values
in experience by means of that active control of objects which
knowledge alone makes possible. [In reaction against the age-long
depreciation of practice in behalf of contemplative knowledge,
there is a temptation simply to turn things upside down. But
the essence of pragmatic instrumentalism is to conceive of both
knowledge and practice as means of making good excellencies of
all kinds - secure in experienced existence.]

From this point of view, the problem of philosophy concerns the
interaction of our judgments about ends to be sought with
knowledge of the means for achieving them. just as in science
the question of the advance of knowledge is the question of
what to do, what experiments to perform, what apparatus to
invent and use, what calculations to engage in, what branches
of mathematics to employ or to perfect, so the problem
of practice is what do we need to know, how shall we obtain that
knowledge and how shall we apply it?

It is an easy and altogether too common a habit to confuse a personal
division of labor with an isolation of function and meaning.
Human beings as individuals tend to devote themselves either to
the practice of knowing or to the practice of a professional,
business, social or aesthetic art. Each takes the other half
of the circle for granted. Theorists and practitioners, however,
often indulge in unseemly wrangles as to the importance of their
respective tasks. Then the personal difference of callings is
hypostatised and made into an intrinsic difference between knowledge
and practice.

If one looks at the history of knowledge, it is plain that at
the beginning men tried to know because they had to do so in order
to live. In the absence of that organic guidance given by their
structure to other animals, man had to find out what he was about,
and he could find out only by studying the environment which constituted
the means, obstacles and result of his behaviour. The desire
for intellectual or cognitive understanding had no meaning except
as a means of obtaining greater security as to the issues of action.
Moreover, even when after the coming of leisure some men were
enabled to adopt knowing as their special calling or profession,
merely theoretical uncertainty continues to have no meaning.

This statement will arouse protest. But the reaction against
the statement will turn out when examined to be due to the fact
that it is so difficult to find a case of purely intellectual
uncertainty, that is one upon which nothing hangs. Perhaps as
near to it as we can come is in the familiar story of the Oriental
potentate who declined to attend a horse race on the ground that
it was already well known to him that one horse could run faster
than another. His uncertainty as to which of several horses could
out-speed the others may be said to have been purely intellectual.
But also in the story nothing depended from it; no curiosity
was aroused; no effort was put forth to satisfy the uncertainty.
In other words, he did not care; it made no difference. And
it is a strict truism that no one would care about any exclusively
theoretical uncertainty or certainty. For by definition in being
exclusively theoretical it is one which makes no difference
anywhere.

Revulsion against this proposition is a tribute to the fact that
actually the intellectual and the practical are so closely bound
together. Hence when we imagine we are thinking of an exclusively
theoretical doubt, we smuggle in unconsciously some consequence
which hangs upon it. We think of uncertainty arising in the course
of an inquiry; in this case, uncertainty until it is resolved
blocks the progress of the inquiry - a distinctly practical affair,
since it involves conclusions and the of producing them. If we
had no desires and no purposes, then, as sheer truism, one state
of things would be as good as any other. Those who have set such
store by the demonstration that Absolute Being already contains
in eternal safety within itself all values, have had as their
interest the fact that while the demonstration would make no difference
in the concrete existence of these values - unless perhaps to
weaken effort to generate and sustain them - it would make no
difference in their own personal attitudes - in a feeling of comfort
or of release from responsibility, the consciousness of a "moral
holiday" in which some philosophers have found the distinction
between morals and religion.

Such considerations point to the conclusion that the ultimate
ground of the quest for cognitive certainty is the need for security
in the results of action. Men readily persuade themselves that
they are devoted to intellectual certainty for its own sake. Actually
they want it because of its bearing on safeguarding what they
desire and esteem. The need for protection and prosperity in
action created the need for warranting the validity of intellectual
beliefs.

After a distinctively intellectual class had arisen, a class having
leisure and in a large degree protected against the more serious
perils which afflict the mass of humanity, its members proceeded
to glorify their own office. Since no amount of pains and care
in action can ensure complete certainty, certainty in knowledge
was worshipped as a substitute. In minor matters, those that
are relatively technical, professional, "utilitarian,"
men continued to resort to improving their methods of operation
in order to be surer of results. But in affairs of momentous
value the requisite knowledge is hard to come by and the bettering
of methods is a slow process to be realised only by the cooperative
endeavour of many persons. The arts to be formed and developed
are social arts; an individual by himself can do little to regulate
the conditions which will render important values more secure,
though with shrewdness and special knowledge he can do much to
further his own peculiar aims - given a fair share of luck. So
because of impatience and because, as Aristotle was given to pointing
out, an individual is self-sufficient in that kind of thinking
which involves no action, the ideal of a cognitive certainty and
truth having no connection with practice, and prized because of
its lack of connection, developed. The doctrine worked out practically
so as to strengthen dependence upon authority and dogma in the
things of highest value, while increase of specialised knowledge
was relied upon in everyday, especially economic, affairs. Just
as belief that a magical ceremony will regulate the growth of
seeds to full harvest stifles the tendency to investigate natural
causes and their workings, so acceptance of dogmatic rules as
bases of conduct in education, morals and social matters, lessens
the impetus to find out about the conditions which are involved
in forming intelligent plans.

It is more or less of a commonplace to speak of the crisis which
has been caused by the progress of the natural sciences in the
last few centuries. The crisis is due, it is asserted, to the
incompatibility between the conclusions of natural science about
the world in which we live and the realm of higher values, of
ideal and spiritual qualities, which get no support from natural
science. The new science, it is said, has stripped the world
of the qualities which made it beautiful and congenial to men;
has deprived nature of all aspiration towards ends, all preference
for accomplishing the good, and presented nature to us as a scene
of indifferent physical particles acting according to mathematical
and mechanical laws.

This effect of modern science has, it is notorious, set the main
problems for modern philosophy. How is science to be accepted
and yet the realm of values to be conserved? This question forms
the philosophic version of the popular conflict of science and
religion. Instead of being troubled about the inconsistency of
astronomy with the older religious beliefs about heaven and the
ascension of Christ, or the differences between the geological
record and the account of creation in Genesis, philosophers have
been troubled by the gap in kind which exists between the fundamental
principles of the natural world and the reality of the values
according to which mankind is to regulate its life.

Philosophers, therefore, set to work to mediate, to find some
harmony behind the apparent discord. Everybody knows that the
trend of modern philosophy has been to arrive at theories regarding
the nature of the universe by means of theories regarding the
nature of knowledge-a procedure which reverses the apparently
more judicious method of the ancients in basing their conclusions
about knowledge on the nature of the universe in which knowledge
occurs. The "crisis" of which we have just been speaking
accounts for the reversal.

Since science has made the trouble, the cure ought to -be found
in an examination of the nature of knowledge, of the conditions
which make science possible. If the conditions of the possibility
of knowledge can be shown to be of an ideal and rational character,
then, so it has been thought, the loss of an idealistic cosmology
in physics can be readily borne. The physical world can be surrendered
to matter and mechanism, since we are assured that matter and
mechanism have their foundation in immaterial mind. Such has
been the characteristic course of modern spiritualistic philosophies
since the time of Kant; indeed, since that of Descartes, who first
felt the poignancy of the problem involved in reconciling the
conclusions of science with traditional religious and moral beliefs.

It would presumably be taken as a sign of extreme naïveté
if not of callous insensitiveness, if one were to ask why all
this ardour to reconcile the findings of natural science with
the validity of values? Why should any increase of knowledge
seem like a threat to what we prize, admire and approve? Why should
we not proceed to employ our gains in science to improve our judgments
about values, and to regulate our actions so as to make values
more secure and more widely shared in existence?

I am willing to run the risk of charge of naïveté
for the sake of making manifest the difference upon which we have
been dwelling. If men had associated their ideas about values
with practical activity instead of with cognition of antecedent
Being, they would not have been troubled by the findings of science.
They would have welcomed the latter. For anything ascertained
about the structure of actually existing conditions would be a
definite aid in making judgments about things to be prized and
striven for more adequate, and would instruct us as to the means
to be employed in realising them. But according to the religious
and philosophic tradition of Europe, the valid status of all the
highest values, the good, true and beautiful, was bound up with
their being properties of ultimate and supreme Being, namely,
God. All went well as long as what passed for natural science
gave no offence to this conception. Trouble began when science
ceased to disclose in the objects of knowledge the possession
of any such properties. Then some roundabout method had to be
devised for substantiating them.

The point of the seemingly crass question which was asked is thus
to elicit the radical difference made when the problem of values
is seen to be connected with the problem of intelligent action.
If the validity of beliefs and judgments about values is dependent
upon the consequences of action undertaken in their behalf, if
the assumed association of values with knowledge capable of being
demonstrated apart from activity, is abandoned, then the problem
of the intrinsic relation of science to value is wholly artificial.
It is replaced by a group of practical problems: How shall we
employ what we know to direct the formation of our beliefs about
value and how shall we direct our practical behaviour so as to
test these beliefs and make possible better ones? The question
is seen to be just what it has always been empirically: What shall
we do to make objects having value more secure in existence?
And we approach the answer to the problem with all the advantages
given us by increase of knowledge of the conditions and relations
under which this doing must proceed.

But for over two thousand years the weight of the most influential
and authoritatively orthodox tradition of thought has been thrown
into the opposite scale. It has been devoted to the problem of
a purely cognitive certification (perhaps by revelation, perhaps
by intuition, perhaps by reason) of the antecedent immutable reality
of truth, beauty and goodness. As against such a doctrine, the
conclusions of natural science constitute the materials of a serious
problem. The appeal has been made to the Court of Knowledge and
the verdict has been adverse. There are two rival systems that
must have their respective claims adjusted. The crisis in contemporary
culture, the confusions and conflicts in it, arise from a division
of authority. Scientific inquiry seems to tell one thing, and
traditional beliefs about ends and ideals that have authority
over conduct tell us something quite different. The problem of
reconciliation arises and persists for one reason only. As long
as the notions persist that knowledge is a disclosure of reality,
of reality prior to and independent of knowing, and that knowing
is independent of a purpose to control the quality of experienced
objects, the failure of natural science to disclose significant
values in its objects will come as a shock. Those seriously concerned
with the validity and authority of value will have a problem on
their hands. As long as the notion persists that values are authentic
and valid only on condition that they are properties of Being
independent of human action, as long as it is supposed that their
right to regulate action is dependent upon their being independent
of action, so long there will be needed schemes to prove that
values are, in spite of the findings of science, genuine and known
qualifications of reality in itself. For men will not easily
surrender all regulative guidance in action. If they are forbidden
to find standards in the course of experience they will seek them
somewhere else, if not in revelation, then in the deliverance
of a reason that is above experience.

This then is the fundamental issue for present philosophy. Is
the doctrine justified that knowledge is valid in the degree in
which it is a revelation of antecedent existences or Being? Is
the doctrine justified that regulative ends and purposes have
validity only when they can be shown to be properties belonging
to things, whether as existences or as essences, apart from human
action? It is proposed to make another start. Desires, affections,
preferences, needs and interests at least exist in human experience;
they are characteristics of it. Knowledge about nature also exists.
What does this knowledge imply and entail with respect to the
guidance of our emotional and volitional life? How shall the
latter lay hold of what is known in order to make it of service?

These latter questions do not seem to many thinkers to have the
dignity that is attached to the traditional problems of philosophy.
They are proximate questions, not ultimate. They do not concern
Being and Knowledge "in themselves' and at large, but the
state of existence at specified times and places and the state
of affection, plans and purposes under concrete circumstances.
They are not concerned with framing a general theory of reality,
knowledge and value once for all, but with finding how authentic
beliefs about existence as they currently exist can operate fruitfully
and efficaciously in connection with the practical problems that
are urgent in actual life.

In restricted and technical fields, men now proceed unhesitatingly
along these lines. In technology and the arts of engineering
and medicine, men do not think of operating in any other way.
Increased knowledge of nature and its conditions does not raise
the problem of validity of the value of health or of communication
in general, although it may well make dubious the validity of
certain conceptions men in the past have entertained about the
nature of health and communication and the best ways of attaining
these goods in fact.

In such matters, science has placed in our hands the means by
which we can better judge our wants, and has aided in forming
the instruments and operations by which to satisfy them. That
the same sort of thing has not happened in the moral and distinctly
humane arts is evident. Here is a problem which might well trouble
philosophers.

Why have not the arts which deal with the wider, more generous,
more distinctly humane values enjoyed the release and expansion
which have accrued to the technical arts? Can it be seriously
urged that it is because natural science has disclosed to us the
kind of world which it has disclosed? It is easy to see that
these disclosures are hostile to some beliefs about values which
have been widely accepted, which have prestige, which have become
deeply impregnated with sentiment, and which authoritative institutions
as well as the emotion and inertia of men are slow to surrender.
But this admission, which practically enforces itself, is far
from excluding the formation of new beliefs about things to be
honoured and prized by men in their supreme loyalties of action.
The difficulty in the road is a practical one, a social one,
connected with institutions and the methods and aims of education,
not with science nor with value. Under such circumstances the
first problem for philosophy would seem to be to clear itself
of further responsibility for the doctrine that the supreme issue
is whether values have antecedent Being, while its further office
is to make clear the revisions and reconstructions that have to
be made in traditional judgments about values. Having done this,
it would be in a position to undertake the more positive task
of projecting ideas about values which might be the basis of a
new integration of human conduct.

We come back to the fact that the genuine issue is not whether
certain values, associated with traditions and institutions, have
Being already (whether that of existence or of essence), but what
concrete judgments we are to form about ends and means in the
regulation of practical behaviour. The emphasis which has been
put upon the former question, the creation of dogmas about the
way in which values are already real independently of what we
do, dogmas which have appealed not in vain to philosophy for support,
have naturally bred, in the face of the changed character of science,
confusion, irresolution and numbness of will. If the men had
been educated to think about broader humane values as they have
now learned to think about matters which fall within the scope
of technical arts, our whole present situation would be very different.
The attention which has gone to achieving a purely theoretical
certainty with respect to them would have been devoted to perfecting
the arts by which they are to be judged and striven for.

Indulge for a moment in an imaginative flight. Suppose that men
had been systematically educated in the belief that the existence
of values can cease to be accidental, narrow and precarious only
by human activity directed by the best available knowledge. Suppose
also men had been systematically educated to believe that the
important thing is not to get themselves personally "right"
in relation to the antecedent author and guarantor of these values,
but to form their judgments and carry on their activity on the
basis of public, objective and shared consequences. Imagine these
things and then imagine what the present situation might be.

The suppositions are speculative- But they serve to indicate the
significance of the one point to which this chapter is devoted.
The method and conclusions of science have without doubt invaded
many cherished beliefs about the things held most dear. The resulting
clash constitutes a genuine cultural crisis. But it is a crisis
in culture, a social crisis, historical and temporal in character.
It is not a problem in the adjustment of properties of reality
to one another. And yet modern philosophy has chosen for the
most part to treat it as a question of how the realities assumed
to be the object of science can have the mathematical and mechanistic
properties assigned to them in natural science, while nevertheless
the realm of ultimate reality can be characterised by qualities
termed ideal and spiritual. The cultural problem is one of definite
criticisms to be made and of readjustments to be accomplished.
Philosophy which is willing to abandon its supposed task of knowing
ultimate reality and to devote itself to a proximate human office
might be of great help in such a task. It may be doubted whether
it can indefinitely pursue the task of trying to show that the
results of science, when they are properly interpreted, do not mean
what they seem to say, or of proving, by means of an examination
of possibilities and limits of knowledge, that after all they
rest upon a foundation congruous with traditional beliefs about
values.

Since the root of the traditional conception of philosophy is
the separation that has been made between knowledge and action,
between theory and practice, it is to the problem of this separation
that we are to give attention. Our main attempt will be to show
how the actual procedures of knowledge interpreted after the pattern
formed by experimental inquiry, cancel the isolation of knowledge
from overt action. Before engaging in this attempt, we shall
in the next chapter show the extent to which modern philosophy
has been dominated by effort to adjust to each other two systems
of belief, one relating to the objects of knowledge and the other
to objects ideal value.